Eightfold co-founders raise $35M for Viven, an AI digital twin startup for querying unavailable co-workers

Although employees spend much of their day communicating and coordinating projects among themselves, this effort is often undermined by the availability of specific individuals. When a colleague with crucial information is away (on vacation or in a different time zone), the rest of the team must delay progress until that person responds.

Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, the co-founders of Eightfold – an AI recruitment startup last valued at $2.1 billion – believe that advances in LLMs and data privacy technologies can help solve some aspects of this costly problem. They were launched earlier this year Alivea digital twin startup on a mission to give employees access to crucial information from teammates, even when those colleagues are unavailable.

On Wednesday, Viven emerged from stealth mode with $35 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures and others.

Viven develops a specialized LLM for each employee, effectively creating a digital twin by accessing their internal electronic documents such as email, Slack and Google Docs. Other employees in the organization can then query that person’s digital twin to get immediate answers regarding common projects and shared knowledge.

“If everyone has a digital twin, you can just talk to his or her twin as if you were talking to that person and get the response,” Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.

A major obstacle is that people simply can’t share everything with everyone who asks. Employees often handle sensitive information or have personal files that they want to keep private from the rest of the team.

According to Ashutosh Garg, Viven’s technology solves that complex problem through a concept known as pairwise context and privacy. This allows the startup’s LLMs to control exactly what information can be shared and with whom within the organization.

Viven’s LLMs are smart enough to recognize personal context and know what information should remain private, such as questions about an employee’s personal life. But perhaps the most important safeguard is that anyone can see the query history of their digital twin, which is a deterrent to people asking inappropriate questions.

“It’s a very difficult problem to solve, and until recently it was unsolvable,” Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, told TechCrunch.

Viven is already used by several enterprise customers, including Genpact and Eightfold. (Co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia continue to lead Eightfold, splitting their time between that company and running Viven.)

On the competition front, Ashutosh Garg claims that no other company is tackling digital twins for the enterprise.

When he first started thinking about the idea, he wasn’t sure there were no competitors. So he called Vinod Khosla to ask about it. The legendary investor assured Ashutosh Garg that no one does this and agreed to invest.

Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital was equally enthusiastic about Viven.

“When Ashutosh came to me and described the product, the big aha for me was: there is a horizontal problem in all tasks of coordination and communication, which no one automates,” Ashu Garg told TechCrunch.

But just because there are no direct competitors now doesn’t mean that other companies won’t build digital twins for businesses in the future. Ashu Garg said Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s enterprise search products have a personalization component. But as they enter this market, Viven hopes that “pairwise” context technology will be its moat.